Summary: <br> How to reach out to Max Branstetter:<br> <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/russelljeffery/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer"> </a><a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/stephen-alemar-75b92435/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer"> </a> <a href="https://www.duda.co/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer"></a><br> Building a website that scales is often your top priority as a company. Nailing components like mobile UX, usefulness of content, and trustworthiness is critical if you want your website to succeed. In this episode, we’re focusing on mobile UX and the best ways to avoid the stick portion of Google’s carrot and stick approach to website rankings.<br> Ready to get started?<br> Let’s dig in to what our guests, Russell Jeffrey and Stephen Alemar from <a href="https://www.duda.co/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Duda</a>, have to say.<br> Mobile UX<br> Mobile UX is the ease with which potential customers are able to engage with your website; however, there is no exact standard for the ideal mobile UX. It is a moving target. Having said that, a solid mobile experience is important because the entire world has adopted the smartphone as the most common access point for the web. Meaning, if you want success on mobile, your website has to be easy to engage with.<br> Luckily, there are a couple ways to improve your mobile UX and avoid penalties. The first is by following best practices laid out by Google in the past few years. Their guidelines for websites and how well you follow them are the deciding factors in your ability to rank on mobile searches. In fact, Stephen and Jeffrey anticipate another event like mobilegeddon, where websites following Google’s best practices will receive huge boosts in their mobile rankings and websites not doing so will see massive drops.<br> The second way to develop a positive mobile experience is to design your web pages in a way that you would find engaging. Examine each page and ask yourself whether you would be interested in staying on the website if you didn’t work for the company.<br> Ask yourself, “ Is the content helpful? Does each page load quickly?”<br> Site speed and relevant, informative, easy-to-read content are critical if you want to future-proof your website against future mobilegeddons.<br> Biggest Mobile UX Mistakes<br> How users perceive your website can have tremendous effects on your ability to rank and bring in business. If pages take longer than five seconds to load, are filled with irrelevant ads, or are difficult to navigate, users are likely to search for their answers on a different website.<br> Despite incidents like mobilegeddon, many websites are sadly missing the mark on their mobile UX. Here are a few of the biggest mistakes companies make when designing their websites:<br> <br> * Slow Website Speed. According to Google, speed is the most important factor in a successful design, and it can make or break a mobile website experience. On average, website speed is currently 17 to 18 seconds on mobile. Ideally, however, it will only take a few seconds to completely load a page. And with Google’s recent reveal of the page speed test and optimizations to their lighthouse testing tool, page speed is likely to become the web’s next mobilegeddon moment.<br> * Not Designed with Mobile in Mind. With so many people are the world now using their phones to search for content, it’s no wonder that Google is pushing websites to have a mobile-first design. Unfortunately, too many companies don’t do this. If you want to make your company stand out from the crowd and future-proof it from ranking penalties, you need to make sure every aspect of your website is consumable and usable via mobile from the get-go. If you don’t, you leave yourself open to drops in rankings.<br> * Poor Formatting. Although mobile-friendly formatting has been addressed for the most part, it is still a critical part of mobile UX.
